Thursday, June 23, 2011

Almost all of my students left for internships this summer. Three of my students, who are working on crowdsourcing and smartphone apps, have been grabbed by Bosch Research Pittsburgh (they got two of them) and IBM Research New York. Some of the projects these students have worked on with me include "using Twitter as a middleware for crowdsourced sensing", "detecting breakpoints in public opinion using Twitter", "crowdsourcing queue lengths at campus cafes with a smartphone campus app", "crowdsourcing location-based queries". Another student working on cloud computing have been employed by VMware (after lucking out with Google since he started interviewing late). His research is on developing user-level wide-area-network filesystems. Finally one brave soul decided he would not apply for internships and stay with me this summer to concentrate on his research (last summer, he had been on an internship with Bosch Research Paolo Alto).

There are alternative explanations for how popular my students got with the companies this summer. I like to attribute this to how hot our research is :-) Of course it could be that my students give very good interviews (I actually don't think this is the case, my students need a lot more improvement in that department). Or, we are in an IT bubble again.